In peace, competition had become difficult, until the British ship owner cried for war; yet he already felt, without acknowledging it even to himself, that in war he was likely to enjoy little profit or pleasure on the day when the long, low, black hull of the Yankee privateer, with her tapering, bending spars, her long-range guns, and her sharp-faced captain, should appear on the western horizon, and suddenly, at the sight of heavy-lumbering British merchantman, should fling out her white wings of canvas, and fly down on her prey.
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American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.
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It was the feeling of a passenger on an ocean steamer whose mind will not give him rest until he has been in the engine-room and talked with t...
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For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless ene...
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Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation
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The outline of the city became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied meaning. Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and...
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We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and, when got, the repose is insupportable
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You say that love is nonsense....I tell you it is no such thing. For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day; a long strain on one's nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength.
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Every man who has at last succeeded, after long effort, in calling up the divinity which lies hidden in a woman's heart, is startled to find that he must obey the God he summoned.
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America had no use for Adams because he was eighteenth-century, and yet it worshipped Grant because he was archaic and should have lived in a ...
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Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.
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Ratcliffe was a great statesman. The smoothness of his manipulation was marvelous. No other man in politics, indeed no other man who had ever ...
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There are two things that seem to be at the bottom of our constitutions; one is a continual tendency towards politics; the other is family pri...
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Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
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You may cut off the heads of every rich man now living—of every statesman—every literary, and every scientific authority, without in the l...
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The spectacle [of American politics] resembles that of swarms of insects changing from worms to wings. They must get the wings or die. For our...
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Politics... have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
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'If Washington were President now, he would have to learn our ways or lose his next election. Only fools and theorists imagine that our societ...
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Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
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To my fancy, one looks back on life, it has only two responsibilities, which include all the others: one is the bringing of new life into exis...
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At the utmost, the active-minded young man should ask of his teacher only mastery of his tools. The young man himself, the subject of educatio...
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One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.
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